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Legends of lugaru werewolf5/7/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Odin, here enthroned next to the wolves Geri and Freki, was the Norse god of war, madness, wisdom, healing, death, and sorcery. In his book Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, folklorist John Lindow notes the irony of Odin feeding one Freki and becoming food for another Freki (or Fenrir). “Freki” and “Fenrir” are even sometimes used interchangeably in Old Norse texts. In the poem Grímnismál, two wolves, Geri and Freki, are said to accompany the trickster god everywhere he goes. And yet, wolves (along with ravens) are dedicated to Odin. On Ragnarok, Fenrir will devour the sun and kill Odin, king of the gods. The gods bound the anthropomorphic wolf Fenrir, son of the trickster god Loki and the giantess Angerboda, in magical chains, knowing that on Ragnarok, the Viking doomsday, “the fetters will burst, and the wolf run free,” as the 10th-century poetic Völuspá prophesizes. The duality of the wolf is also embedded in Norse mythology. The sagas are full of blood feuds and quarrels between various Viking chieftains, but occasionally those chieftains could work together, consolidate power, and, eventually, create the framework for modern Scandinavian nations. “Viking society functioned very much like a wolf society, with these alpha males who would occasionally work together,” says Brownworth. Sven Rosborn/Wikipedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0Īnd yet wolves, and packs specifically, are also symbolic of powerful social order. Any Viking who kills a close family member would be strung up by the heels next to a live wolf-“he having acted as a wolf which will slay its fellows.” The Viking Age Tullstorp runestone is believed to depict a wolf, perhaps the god-eating Fenrir. In his Danish History, late-12th-century historian Saxo Grammaticus wrote about another wolf-related punishment. In a society in which family and social ties were everything, it was akin to a social death-and could often lead to literal death, too, since exiles could be killed with impunity. As Stefan Brink writes in The Viking World, being exiled was “the worst punishment” for Vikings. In one sense, wolves exist “outside of society,” says Brownworth, noting that the word for “exile” in Old Norse, vargr, is the same word used for “wolf.” Being exiled in Viking society meant living like a wolf in the forest, an enemy to mankind. And yet, “Vikings, especially particular tribes, embraced the connection” to wolves, says Dutch historical anthropologist Willem de Blécourt. They’re destroyers, kind of night-creatures, and they are strongest in some ways where we are weakest,” says historian Lars Brownworth, author of The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings. Vikings both admired wolves’ strength and, as a largely agricultural society, feared it. Viking werewolf stories, like Sigmundr and Sinfjötli’s, reflect the complexity of the wolf as a symbol in Viking society. The Viking obsession with wolves extends to the artifacts they left behind, such as the elaborately carved animal-head posts found in the Oseberg burial, part of the recently announced new Museum of the Viking Age in Oslo. Even after the raids stopped, popular stories linked Viking descendants to werewolves (if slightly nicer ones). It’s something victims of Viking raids also saw in the Norsemen who descended on them from the seas they referred to them as “sea-wolves” and “ ware-wolves” in medieval histories. Viking warrior bands would growl and howl and bite in battle, and sometimes even attack their compatriots in their frenzy. Wolves, such as the world-ending Fenrir, are woven into their mythology. There are upwards of 50 different werewolf stories Vikings would tell around roaring fires to help pass long, dark Scandinavian winters. It turns out the Vikings were a bit obsessed with wolves and the people who become them. The story of Sigmundr and Sinfjötli is one of the Viking world’s oldest and most popular tales, passed down orally for centuries before being written down in the Vǫlsunga Saga around 1270. Some scholars believe these posts might depict Odin’s wolves, Geri and Freki. Four of these carved, animal-head posts were found in the Osberg ship burial, the most lavish Viking gravesite known today. ![]()
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